E182 Luke Baldwin: Rarer Than Diamonds

E182 Luke Baldwin: Rarer Than Diamonds

Luke Baldwin started a carbon credit business in 2023 — by his own admission, the worst possible year to do it. The market was in freefall, trust was gone, and nobody was buying. Two years later, his business closed the first deal in the world to capitalise future carbon removals as an intangible asset on a corporate balance sheet. This conversation goes into why the environmental sector still hasn't built a product good enough to compete for capital, why "voluntary carbon markets" is the wrong name for the wrong reasons, and why nature-based credits are about to become one of the scarcest assets on the planet — rarer than diamonds, in Luke's words. We get into the mechanics of the Clyde & Co deal, why insurance is quietly becoming the backbone of the entire carbon market, and why nobody buys a house because it's "high integrity." This is a masterclass in the financial architecture nobody in this sector wants to talk about — and why that architecture is the only thing that will actually move institutional money.

E181 Clifford Chance, Live: The Honest Room

Five years ago a carbon credit was $1 and largely a joke. Today it's hundreds of pounds a tonne, rated, insured, and traded on an exchange. The people who did that are in this room. Live at Clifford Chance during London Climate Action Week 2026, Rich convened a panel that doesn't usually end up on record together: a Magic Circle funds lawyer, the CEO of Climate Asset Management, a conservation operator negotiating the contracts that underpin gold-standard carbon credits, the CEO of the Lifescape Project, and one of the leading legal experts in the carbon market. The conversation was honest from the first question. What's still hard? What isn't working? And what would you change tomorrow if you could? What followed was the sector's real conversation — the one that normally stays behind closed doors. On why regulation keeps arriving as a stick and never a carrot. Why the biggest biodiversity market in the world isn't BNG, it's the US wetland mitigation banking system — and most people in this room don't even know it exists. Why fund structures designed for a decade are being asked to hold assets that need a century. Why OC just received the highest nature-based carbon credit rating ever awarded. And why, if you mandate that every large corporate offsets their emissions tomorrow, this entire market changes overnight. Full live conversation from London Climate Action Week 2026 with Lily Marcel, Rich Stockdale, Adam Eagle, Hannah Davies, Martin Berg, and Adam Hedley.

E180 Nature Inc. Live: Live From London Climate Week

The economy has always been a subsidiary of nature. We just didn't have the instruments to prove it. Now we do — and the conversation is getting uncomfortable in the best possible way. Recorded live at London Climate Week, this is the conversation the sector has been having in private, finally happening in public. Tripp Wall of Pantheon Regeneration, Siddarth Shrikanth of Just Climate, and Dimple Patel of NatureMetrics spend 90 minutes on the hard questions: where capital is actually moving, what AI sovereignty means for nature tech businesses, why bananas are going extinct and nobody's noticed, why we spent a decade yelling at people instead of inviting them in, and whether the next 12 months will finally produce the iconic transactions that shift allocator psychology for good. There's no consensus here. There's challenge, disagreement, and a room full of people who are done waiting. What unites them is the belief that the tools exist, the moment is real, and optimism is a strategy — not a sentiment.

E179 Allister Furey: Manufacturing Trust

Allister Furey trained as a biologist, fell into AI before anyone called it AI, built kite-powered wind energy systems, sold a company to a competitor, ran operations in Singapore, and ended up building a carbon ratings agency. Not because it was the plan. Because the market was lying and someone had to say so. Allister is CEO and co-founder of Sylvera — the data business that rates carbon and commodity credits, prices geospatial data, and tries to inject statistical rigour into a market that has spent years rewarding a good story over a real outcome. He's one of the most technically formidable people to appear on this podcast, and this conversation covers more ground than most. We get into what it actually takes to build consistent, manufactured opinion at scale — the moment they had to call clients and tell them millions of dollars of credits had been wrongly rated, the analogy that changed how they think about quality, and the single thing that needs to happen before voluntary carbon markets can grow. The answer involves the Treasury, the emissions trading scheme, and a direct challenge to how we think about the licence to pollute. It's closer than most people think — and more political than most people want to admit.

E178 OC Round Table: Building A Dynasty

Five years ago there was no portfolio. No team. No podcast. No estates. The highest carbon credit price was under £20. Biodiversity net gain didn't exist. Rich had a business plan and a conviction that you couldn't scale conservation without capital — and almost everyone told him it was too complicated, too risky, or too ambitious. This episode is the five-year reckoning. Gathered with three of the people who built it with Rich Stockdale: Fiona Milden, Managing Director; Andrew Dewar, Head of People and Culture; and Chris White, Head of Natural Capital and Oxygen Intelligence, Rich looks back at what it actually took. The recruitment stories that made him cry. The culture decisions that kept them honest at 8pm on a Thursday night. The world-record carbon credit prices. And the AI and data system, Claudia, that a US competitor raised $100 million to build while OC built it in the day job. But this isn't a victory lap. It's a live question. How do you protect culture as you scale? How do you keep hiring people smarter than you? What does it cost personally to work at this level? And what does the next five years look like when you're building a business you think will be acquired by Nvidia or DeepMind? This is a conversation about what it actually takes. Not the idea. The execution.